Racism and war may keep Netanyahu in power
“After Israel attacked seven countries over the last year,” wrote Palestinian attorney and analyst Diana Buttu on Israel’s election day, “one would think that Israelis, who are voting for the first time since November 2022, would finally be asking themselves about the futility of these ‘forever wars,’ the futility of the nearly six-decade-long military occupation and maybe, just maybe, they’d conclude they didn’t need to commit genocide and pogroms. But that is not Israel.”
Voting in an apartheid state
The genocide and pogroms committed by Israel appeared far from the minds of Jewish voters – including the more than 800,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem - who went to the polls on October 27. The day before, the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry had issued a damning report on Israel’s “continuing genocide in Gaza” despite the ‘ceasefire,’ its “widespread and systematic attack against civilians” in the West Bank, including the use of torture and sexual violence, and the Palestinian Authority’s harsh repression of Palestinians perceived as critical of its actions.
But Israel’s war crimes were very much on the minds of its Palestinian citizens, the 20% of Israel’s population who are subjected to as many as 100 discriminatory laws – see the list of them here. After the Supreme Court overturned the Central Elections Committee ban on the two main Palestinian-majority lists (Ra’am and the Joint List), the Joint List released an ad that appeared on Israeli television showing the devastation in Gaza and declaring, “The other parties want more destruction. We offer life.”
The election had a 77.9% voter turnout, with a 60% record turnout among Palestinian Israelis. The Joint list said Eisenkot’s anti-Netanyahu ‘Change’ bloc faces a choice of “supremacy or building democracy.” Netanyahu’s Likud party won the highest number of seats (27) and Trump claimed his endorsement of Netanyahu “helped him a lot.” But Likud and its allies together won only 53 seats in the Knesset (11 fewerthan in the last election), falling short of the 61 seats needed to form a government in a chamber of 120 seats. Yashar, the party of his main opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, won 21 seats. Those seats, added to the seats won by the other parties in the main opposition ‘Change’ bloc, boost him to a total of 48, well below 61. Ra’am and the Joint List, whose political positions are described here, together won 19 seats. Eisenkot’s bloc together with those 19 seats would be enough to bring down Netanyahu’s rule which has been their main objective.
But despite some post-election demonstrations calling for a partnership with Palestinian-Israeli parties, that is unlikely to happen. Apart from the Democrats who won only eight seats, there is across the political spectrum strong opposition to including Palestinian citizens of Israel in the government. According to Israeli commentator Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, at least 20 members of the opposition bloc would leave if Eisenkot invited the ‘Arab parties’ into the coalition. Racism has hardened, he stated, and “Israel is a genocidal state at its heart now.” This chilling piece reveals the extent to which a genocidal racism has been instilled into the minds of young Israelis. Trump-style, Netanyahu immediately fanned the flames of racism by accusing the two Palestinian-Israeli blocs of stealing the election with the help of foreign backing while offering no evidence.
So what happens next? After President Herzog invites either Netanyahu or Eisenkot to try to form a government there could be months of haggling to do so. Meanwhile Netanyahu remains the caretaker prime minister. A resumption of the war on Iran may enable him to convince the opposition to form a ‘unity government’. The bargaining process Israel is now embarked on is described here.
‘Forever wars’ appear to be on the Israel-US agenda
According to some reports, Netanyahu wanted to resume a joint Israel-US military onslaught on Iran before the election but Trump did not cooperate, and Iran did not react on October 19 when Israeli jets reportedly flew to its border before turning around. On October 25, a Netanyahu campaign ad cranked up the fear by depicting an Iranian nuclear bomb exploding over Tel Aviv with the message that only Netanyahu could save Israel from a ‘second Holocaust.’
The New York Times and several other newspapers have reported that the US and Israel militaries are making plans for a massive attack on Iran following the US midterm election which could give a significant boost to Netanyahu’s caretaker government. It could also prompt Iranian and Ansar Allah (Houthi) strikes on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries and further endanger the world economy. According to the US Central Command, the Iran war has cost the United States $47.1 billion so far, without counting the cost of repairing the extensive damage to American military bases in the region. The Inspector General of the Pentagon has informed Congress that the Iran war has left the military with “strategic inventory shortfalls.” A detailed analysisby Stephen Semler calculates that over the last three years the US deployed 609 ballistic missile defense interceptors to protect Israel, costing $11 billion.
Israel has meanwhile destroyed 48 of the 60 villages and towns in south Lebanon, according to a New York Times investigation. It has also uprooted and stolen many of south Lebanon’s ancient olive trees and contaminated its land with white phosphorus and glyphosate. On October 19, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz elicited cheers when he hailed “the Gaza model” and stated that Israel had wiped out more than 60 villages in what Israel calls its ‘security zone’ in Lebanon. “Every single village, we’re talking about 23,000 homes, is in ruins…There are no residents left, 200,000 people have been displaced.”
Netanyahu prepares for pariah status
Netanyahu appears to have given thought to how Israel could deal with the end of the Trump presidency, the erosion of “Israel can do no wrong’ Congressional support and the imposition of meaningful economic sanctions. His plan is for Israel to forego billions in annual military aid from the US since it is fast becoming a lightning rod for activism. Instead, the Israeli government is pushing for a more covert “reciprocal partnership” integrating the US and Israeli militaries in data fusion and the joint development of weapons, which was included in the $1.5 trillion FY27 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The House and Senate Armed Service Committees are currently seeking to reconcile the versions of the NDAA that have emerged from the chambers. California Rep. Ro Khanna is circulating a Congressional letter, which reportedly has 30 signatures to date, urging them to strip out the military integration section.
How could Israel deal with global sanctions that include the banking sector? Netanyahu said in a Channel 10 interview on October 23 that “you need to prepare an economy that can circumvent them…and I’m working on that as well,” referencing blockchain and cryptocurrency. The next day the Bank of Israel condemned the notion that cryptocurrencies could “be used as a route for bypassing sanctions” and leading economists also panned the idea, saying it would cause “irreversible damage” to Israel. Writing in The Times of Israel on October 25, Ted Sasson of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies suggests that Netanyahu’s remarks about sanctions and cryptocurrency signal his determination not to be deterred by global pressure from building settlements in the E1 area east of Jerusalem, that would cut the West Bank in two and put an end to any possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
More mass displacement and settler violence in the West Bank
During its election season, Israel has been intensifying its chokehold on the West Bank and its displacement of Palestinians. After two soldiers were killed by two Palestinian gunmen at a Hebron checkpoint on October 23, Netanyahu announced that Israel would lock down the West Bank, would “destroy” the entire neighborhood where the shooters lived, and impose on Hebron the methods it had earlier used to forcibly and permanently displace some 40,000 people from refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams in the north of the West Bank. “We will implement the successful and aggressive model we used in the refugee camps, which are essentially terrorist strongholds…we will evacuate the residents, we will go house to house, we will remove the weapons there as well, and all the terrorist infrastructure will be dealt with and destroyed,” he declared.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem immediately urged the international community to take action to avoid “another wave of ethnic cleansing and war crimes.” But the latest episode of collective punishment went ahead undeterred. Over the first six days of the operation in Hebron, Israeli forces sealed off the West Bank’s largest city, flattened the neighborhood of Ein Deir Baha and displaced as many as 5,000 people from their homes according to the Hebron Municipality, with residents given only one hour to pack and leave. Some buildings were transformed into interrogation centers and Muslims were barred from entering the Ibrahimi Mosque. As in Jenin, many of the streets and the water and sewage infrastructure were destroyed in the process of turning part of Hebron into a ghost town. “As the world fails to act,” Israeli forces are also continuing to push Palestinians out of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of al-Bustan and reduce their houses to rubble.
Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers continue to stand by as settlers turn the Palestinian olive harvest into “a gantlet of violence and fear.” By October 26, there had been at least 482 settler attacks targeting the 2026 olive harvest. Some 98,000 olive trees have been damaged during the past three years. As many as 80 people, including American, British and Israeli rabbis, were detained on October 21 as they were helping with the olive harvest near Nahalin. Among them was Brad Lander, a Jewish New York Congressional candidate. The self-described liberal Zionist stated: “The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.” Five days later, Israeli forces detained a 23-strong delegation of politicians from various European countries at the Allenby/King Hussein bridge for nine hours and barred them from entering the West Bank.
In Gaza the death count spirals upward and hunger accelerates
In the Gaza Strip, as Mohamed Solaimane writes in Mondoweiss, 21,500 people have been officially been declared ‘missing’ and no one knows if they are dead or alive in Israeli custody. Meanwhile, the known death toll keeps rising – it has reached 74,594 with 1,580 killed during the bogus ‘ceasefire’ and eight killed on November 1. While Israel claims it is only killing ‘terrorists,’ children continue to fill body bags. On October 25-26, Jouri al-Soufi, a seven-year old girl, was among the 11 people who were slaughtered in air strikes including on a tented encampment, and over 800 were displaced when tents caught fire. On October 27, six-year-old Tahani Saeed Shalalfa was shot dead by Israeli gunfire.
The UN World Food Program, which had provided 1.6 million people in Gaza with food, announced on October 19 that it had been forced by a funding shortfall to cut in half the amount of food it makes available to the population. With 67% of Gaza’s residents facing acute food insecurity, an estimated 200,000 are now again in danger of famine. Middle East Eye reported on October 23 that Israel had blocked the entry of wheat flour shipments “citing an alleged tax dispute between merchants and the Hamas-led authorities. Hamas and Palestinian importers denied the claim.” Soon there were reports of long lines outside bakeries which were shutting down for lack of flour. Here Shaimaa Eid, who lives in Gaza, describes what it is like when the markets are largely empty, prices unaffordable, and residents are “caught between displacement and the loss of life’s basic necessities.”
Fuel and spare parts for generators are also in short supply thanks to Israel’s restrictions on what can enter Gaza. When available, fuel is ten times more expensive than it was before the war, leaving many families to live in the dark as winter approaches. Then there is the “financial siege” that prevents cash from entering Gaza. With the destruction of banks and disappearance of bank notes, people are being pushed to depend on electronic payments giving Israel increased control over the society.
International solidarity defies media silence
Another Gaza resident, the writer Ziad Medoukh, details here “the horrific situation” in which people are trapped. She manages to extract from the horror “three positive elements”: the learning centers set up in damaged buildings and tents in which “education has become a form of nonviolent resistance and a sign of hope for the future”; the resilience of the population “that adapts and asks only to live”; and international solidarity displayed by people who are mobilizing “despite the complicit silence of the leaders”. She must have been heartened by the extraordinary example of solidarity displayed by dockworkers who organized a world strike for Palestine on October 30 which involved 25 unions striking at 113 ports in 22 countries and was called “the largest coordinated port action ever.”
The fact that the US mainstream press gave the strike barely a mention underscores the message delivered by US Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese in her latest report, Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide. Here she describes “three mutually reinforcing patterns” - the systematic targeting of Palestinian reporters and Gaza’s media infrastructure; “the broader Israeli architecture of information control”; and the way Palestinians are dehumanized and Israeli narratives reproduced by digital platforms and the mainstream media. “Viewed together,” she writes, “these practices constitute an assault on truth that is intrinsic to the genocidal violence they are intended to conceal.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine